Android potpourri: alert boxes and other minutiae

As John Lennon, once said, life happens when you’re making other plans. Well that sort of happened to us recently with all the excitement about the Kindle HD/NOOK HD.

Well, in terms of Corona’s support for these devices, we’re there with support for the Kindle HD and we’re pretty much there for NOOK HD.

One thing we found is that if your ‘build.settings’ file contains any Lua syntax errors, your APK may not pass the NOOK pre-flight submission tests. As a convenience to you, we’re going to make a change so that even if you have an error in that file, your APK should still work. Luckily, you’ll get this change for free — we found a way to post the change on our servers, so sometime tomorrow, your NOOK device builds should pass the submission even if you have errors in your ‘build.settings’ file.

While we sorted out some of the more critical issues, we had a few spare cycles to work on some potpourri (available in daily build 929):

One of the things we did was change the MapView’s loading background color from white to grey. This makes the activity indicator easier to see. We also fixed a bug where the native activity indicator would black out the entire screen. Both these issues seemed to be due to the NOOK HDs not setting their defaults the same way as other Android devices.

We hit a strange NOOK HD bug where the MapView wasn’t redrawing itself properly. Luckily, we’re kind of used to working around these bugs on standard and custom Android devices, so we found a simple workaround.

If you’re an interface nut, you’ll find this last one interesting. On the new NOOK HDs, we just didn’t like the default theme for the alert boxes, so we decided to make them adopt the Jellybean (4.1) default theme (“Holo Dark”). Compare the default look (left) and the Jellybean theme (right):

So starting in daily build 929, we’re going to adopt the 4.1 theme across all Android-based devices, whether they are standard Android (Google Play) or custom Android devices (Kindle HD and NOOK HD). This will make your apps more consistent across all the entire Android spectrum.

NOTE, that this will happen only on Android 3.x devices and higher, so if your apps run on older devices, they will still present alerts with the older look (including the older Kindles and NOOKs).

For those that are curious, here’s the side-by-side of the old (left) vs new (right) look. Note that the ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’ button locations are swapped: